Analysis: Social Media and Humanitarian Response

Last week I was in Guatemala to attend our global rapid response team meeting (it sounds like a long way to go from Australia for a meeting- in fact, it is- but given that most of the team were just coming out of Haiti, it made sense).

One of the things I was asked to do was present on social media and its application to the field of emergency response- something that I’ve gotten gradually more involved in over the past six months or so, via a very active network of bloggers and tweeters from the aid profession (whose links can be found on the right hand side of this blog under “Aid Blogs”). Not very many people showed up (demonstrating that perceptions of the professional benefits of social media are still undersubscribed), however I wanted to capture the main points of the discussions that were had, as there have been pockets of interest since I brought the topic up.

Additionally, I would value any further ideas people might have as to how aid work and social media can interact professionally.

I hosted the agenda of the session, as well as some briefing notes, on my blog (I figure, we’re talking about social media, let’s use social media). I had also planned to run real-time feedback from the group via Twitter. However because only 4 people showed up to the session, this proved to be unnecessary (in fact, even inconvenient).

The web is no longer a place where entities from without create information and services, place them onto the internet and wait for clients to come to their sites. The concept of social media revolves around a confluence of interconnectivity between users and information, via the medium of various online platforms. In simpler terms, the web is made up of services (applications, websites, interfaces- increasingly hosted by the network itself) to which people (anybody with a computer) can add information (words, data, media, etc.). People then interact both with each other, and this information. People create, edit and own the information, and the web simply becomes a conduit for this to take place. This is, in essence, Web 2.0.

These platforms include (but certainly aren’t limited to) social networking sites like MySpace (MyWhereDidThatGo?) and Facebook; blog services such as WordPress (hooray), Blogger, and microblogging sites like Twitter, Tumblr and Posterous; wikis (community-owned information sources) such as Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Urban Dictionary, Wikimedia and Wikileaks; multimedia sites such as YouTube, Vimeo, Flickr, Photobucket and SmugMug; and all the way through to mashups such as Dopplr and a whole host of other creative amalgams.

I see three main applications for social media in the world of humantarian response and aid work:
1. Near-real-time input into project and operational quality
2. Professional networking
3. Communications

Quality

The 1 Million Shirts debate (discussed on this blog and widely elsewhere) saw a huge amount of interested and conversation about good overseas assistance, what to do and how to do it (as well as a hefty chunk of what not to do). Saundra has the definitive catalogue of posts relating to the issue here.

This highlighted the potential of social media and ‘buzz’ to trigger the creation of good-practice consensus, creative ideas, and professional debate relating to a topic or operation, very very rapidly. As you can see in Saundra’s post, there was even a chunk of literature created which discussed the phenomenon itself.

Social media provides a platform for real-time critique- that is, an idea gets put forward, it gets discussed and analysed, its flaws and strengths get highlighted, alternative suggestions are made, and a group consensus around its appropriateness is roughly formed- and all in a matter of hours or days. The potential application for individuals or organizations brave enough to float their planned aid interventions in such a network means that a wide range of people with diverse professional and technical expertise and experience could contribute to improving an idea or operation in a very short amount of time. Indeed the speed with which the Million Shirts debate created critique put most NGOs’ own internal feedback and quality mechanisms to shame.

Social media also provides a platform for rapid innovation. Similar to critique, we saw with Million Shirts how quickly ideas and alternatives were suggested in response to an idea which people initially met with skepticism and hostility. The potential to crowd-source innovation from a pool of aid practioners, academics and enthusiasts has the potential to challenge organizations’ own way of sourcing new ideas or improving current practices. This can happen rapidly, so that even in the space of a rapidly evolving crisis (such as we saw in Haiti) there’s room for discussion and rapid sharing of ideas around how to problem-solve or create alternative methodologies. Additionally, even during ‘peace-time’ when an emergency isn’t necessarily underway, social media provides a broad platform from which to draw ideas and innovation.

Real-time literature creation, linked to both innovation and critique, is a natural byproduct of the engagement with aid-related issues. Currently, this takes the form primarily of blog-posts, although there is increasing movement towards alternative forms of cataloguing information (e.g. wikis), and room for multimedia approaches as well (see Jason’s video contributions to the Million Shirts debate, for an example of how it can become part of the conversation, for better or for worse). Again, Saundra’s post cataloguing the Million Shirts debate is a perfect case-in-point as to how information can be created, catalogued and accessed simply, and in a very organic way.

Finally, and for me most excitingly, social media presents the possibility of real-time accountability. By sharing information or ideas about planned projects or ongoing operations, aid practitioners and organizations open themselves up to the real-time critique and thus real-time accountability of the crowd. This accountability can work in all directions. There is upward accountability, to donors (both institutional donors like governments, and the giving public), who can follow along with your plans and decide whether or not they like their funds going in that direction. There is horizontal accountability, to other aid professionals and organizations, who can agree with or otherwise your approaches and techniques, and suggest alternatives based on their own experience.

Most importantly (but also, currently, most undersubscribed) there is downward accountability- that is, being accountable to the recipients of assistance projects and operations. The penetration of mobile phones into rural communities has transformed the connectivity and social landscape of sub-Saharan Africa, and it’s possible to forsee in a relatively accessible future a time when large portions of the populations aid agencies serve will have access to the internet, to Twitter, to blogs, and so forth. By putting ideas out into the public domain, organizations and practitioners will make themselves additionally accountable to their constituents in this way- something that may well force a change in all kinds of business thinking in the aid industry.

Networking

In many ways this is self-explanatory, and a natural by-product of social media. The value of networking is in part captured by the previous discussion on quality- the ability to share ideas, experiences, practice and techniques with other aid professionals, and to cross-pollinate between organizations, sectors and even industries. Professional social networking allows both virtual interactions- discussions on Twitter and in the blogosphere- as well as facilitating real-world interactions. Tweet-ups bring people based in a similar area together (I’ve engaged in a couple of these myself already), while applications like the travel mashup Dopplr allow travellers to find geographical intersections with other people within their network and so facilitate real-world interaction.

Some of the key uses of professional social networking include:
Creating new real-world contacts
Building communities (interest groups, communities of practice, virtual centres of excellence)
Crowd-sourcing (using knowledge held in the broader network to solve problems- Ushahidi is an example of a humanitarian platform which taps into the network as a resource)
Information Management
Information Sharing (Twitter is great for this; the new currency in URLs, with extremely short summaries, are a great way of finding relevant and important information quickly and centrally)
Ideas Generation/Dialogue
Relationship-Building/Maintainence (especially for geographically dispersed teams- very common in the aid sector)
Community Engagement (again, this is still undersubscribed, but in time, think of the potential to be able to network directly with community members and aid recipients via social media)

The key to successful networking via social media is to be deliberate. This is a very different phenomenon to the sort of thing that happens on Facebook, where your network is primarily made up of people you know in the real world, and you share meaningless frivolity. On James Shelley’s useful blog post on networking and Twitter, he outlines 3 key principles for what networking needs to encompass which I’ve adapted slightly:

1. Have a purpose- identify a need or an area you want input into, don’t just wander into cyberspace and start waffling- or listening to other peoples’ waffle- but rather have a reason behind what you’re wanting out of the experience, and seek accordingly

2. Be focused- think about how you can capture what is important from your networks, and organize your interface accordingly (James highlights the usefulness of Twitter lists for this, but there are other tools)

3. Link to people who matter- don’t just follow somebody because you went to school with them, but identify people who have something to say that you actually want to hear about, and which will improve what you do or how you live your life (James suggests following people who are a part of your real-world community; however in a geographically dispersed profession like aid work, it makes sense to network broader than your own face-to-face networks)

A good approach is to use a cascading or key-informant method, where you identify one or two people in the social media scene who you know, who are well-connected to the things you are interested in, and who are active. Look at who they are talking to, what conversations they are having with whom, and poach accordingly. And think about your audience. Nobody’s going to listen to you if you don’t have something relevant to say.

Communcation

Communication is an obvious use for social media, and yet at the same time has hidden implications. Haiti was one of the first big disasters where agencies found that social media played a significant role- particularly the amount of interest and chatter in donor countries as they watched the situation unfold. From a marketing and donor-engagement perspective, there was (and continues to be) an information void in social media space around real-time information on developing emergencies. Agencies and operations that can fill this space with reliable information will win interest, followers, support, trust, goodwill and possibly resources, and will contribute to their own brand recognition and network creation.

Social media communication takes place on different levels. Organizations that can break information early and update on evolving situations contribute to headlines. Their tweets get re-tweeted and their resources get linked to. This is about being relevant, and being fast. People want to know about what is happening now. The focus of this portion of communicating is about grabbing peoples’ attention.

Beyond this is the opportunity to provide analysis- in near-real time. Blogs are one of the ideal mechanisms for this (written and video), and by grabbing people’s attention you can then move them over (once you have suffficient resources/information) to these other platforms to share your explanations and thinking, and to draw people deeper into the event and the response to it. It’s important to note that this is a struggle for many NGOs- how to pull donors into that next and deeper level of engagement. This is both about donor education, and about relationship-building. Taking this an extra step (a crucial extra step) is providing the opportunity for people to respond to your information- to comment, question, discuss and disagree. This interactivity is what keeps people engaged and interested, builds relationship, and ultimately contributes to the personalization of experience via the various platforms.

Taking this interaction to one additional level is the idea of crowd-sourcing of information on an evolving context. Recent emergencies have seen this as an increasing trend, particularly in rapid-onset disasters. It was evident in the floods that hit Manila in September 2009 following Typhoon Ketsana, with people using Twitter to mobilize support for response logistics (“volunteers needed”), as well as communicating the location of people trapped on rooftops in the hope that rescue services would be able to respond. Indeed in the early hours after the floods hit, when networks were down in many parts of the city, social networking tools like Facebook were being used to coordinate staff and begin the response.

This was also seen in Haiti, with people tweeting the location of buried victims, or communicating the names of loved ones in the hope that they’d be found and identified via the networks. If harvested correctly, there’s huge potential in crowd-sourcing of real-time information in support of emergency response where time is of the essence, where traditional communication networks may be damaged and where people on the ground have essential information to save lives. The crowd-sourcing platform Ushahidi, itself developed over social networks in dialogue with aid practicioners, aims to do just this, and sets up pages for specific responses where people on the ground are able to report incidents in order to share and coordination information as it evolves in real time.

The most important paradigm to bear in mind with new/social media versus traditional media is that we have shifted from “Edit then Publish” to “Publish then Edit” (thanks to @worldbeatboy for commentary on this shift in media paradigm). In the past, media sources owned the information and provided it as a service. They would receive data, check the source for accuracy and credibility, proof-read the content, and only when they were confident in it would they release it for consumption, under copyright, and [ultimately] for some sort of commercial gain.

This is no longer the case. Information is owned by the crowd. When a middle-income computer user in Peru can tweet about an earthquake that happened twenty minutes ago in his or her home town, the currency of Reuters as a source of reliable information has just been devalued (although not entirely, because an organization like Reuters still has a reputation and credibility, while tweeter X may not- and this is where developing a credible social media presence is so essential). This process is known as ‘disintemediarization’- the loss of the intemediary when it comes to information flows.

The reality of an emerging event like a natural disaster means that uncertainty and complexity are supreme, and information in the early hours and even days following an event may be contradictory and unclear. Under the old paradigm, misinformation was heavily penalized through loss of confidence. Today, readers have to credit themselves with the ability to judge and analyse the source of a piece of information and decide whether or not to trust it. Over time, and as more information becomes clear, the network itself chooses what is credible and what is not, and the facts become clearer. Publish, and then edit. The key here is to make sure that you’re saying something- to maintain your presence. Something as accurate and reliable as possible- but if you need to re-adjust a previous statement due to prior uncertainty, this is, under the new paradigm, more acceptable than not saying anything at all.

Of course for large organizations like INGOs, this presents a reversal of traditional risk-management practices where credibility and reputation are the most important portions of a brand. By ‘building a bridge’ directly between field and constituent (donor, recipient or colleague) via the information networks, organizations experience a loss of control of that information. INGOs need to learn how to let go of their ownership of information- or risk becoming irrelevant, or worse, seen as manipulative. They also have to learn how to manage a different sort of risk- the risk of saying the wrong thing in the haste to say something, and the risk, where so much information is accessible to and by the network, that they may face criticism for their action (or lack thereof) by a highly scrutinizing public with ever more access to field-level information, and that criticism could, if mishandled, go viral- without any control.

Further Discussion

Engaging with social media is not a luxury, or something that needs to be planned for, or something that needs to be followed closely to see what direction the trends are going to take. This is the current mode of operating, and while the precise form may vary (what will the next Facebook or Twitter look like?), the process of engaging with this new and rapidly adapting space is necessary- or organizations will become irrelevant- or worse, get badly burned by their lack of presence and voice.

The technology is continuing to develop, often at dizzying speeds. The explosion of powerful portable platforms such as the iPhone and its various colourful cousins mean that connectivity is more and more possible, in more sophisticated ways, from more places, quicker. The potential for creativity and innovation is not quite, but nearly, endless.

As an example (and we touched on this in the discussion in Guatemala) I love the connectivity potential around real-time accountability and communication around our field operations in an emergency. Currently, our supply-chain gurus are developing a mobile platform to manage relief-good distributions, based around digital handsets. Goods for distribution are marked-up with barcodes. As community members come to collect their allocated supplies, their names are ticked off the list (pre-loaded into the handsets), and the goods are swiped by the bar-code reader which is stored in the handset (and uploaded to a server).

Taking this a step further, and these same handsets can be pre-loaded with assessment templates for staff carrying out rapid needs assessments. They can have inbuilt cameras (e.g. the iPhone). Staff can send images or text messages a few times a day to a central communications manager who can then take this information and feed it back out in near-real-time to waiting social media networks such as Twitter, blogs, and Facebook (or alternative platforms). Every hour, the servers can compile what has been distributed to date or what assessment information is coming in from the handsets. Meaty data is being provided to our constituents (donors, colleagues, recipients and the media) in almost real-time. The technological potential to quickly capture, process and re-distribute data of a meaty variety already exists, and the issue isn’t so much ‘can we do it?’ as ‘what can we do with it?’ I’m sure there are zillions of other creative ideas out there (all of which welcome), and this is just a shallow outline of one such thought that mills in my head from time to time, and which I think we are ever closer to realising.

There are of course critiques, which have also been discussed elsewhere. This new model requires the recipient of information to take the role both of consumer, and of editor/quality control. We need to trust that whoever is reading a piece of information about our work is taking the time to assess the source, and compare that new piece of information with other pieces they already know to be reliable. And, of course, not everybody does this. Which is how rumours go viral.

Additionally, crowd consensus does not equal truth, or righteousness. Crowds are open to misinformation and deliberate manipulation. They are also open to imbalance driven by disproportional voice or presence. A particularly loud or forceful member of a crowd-sourced dataset during an emergency response could easily skew responses in a dangerous direction. Negative crowd consensus on a poorly conceived (or perceived) assistance program can turn into an ugly mob.

There needs to be a balance between allowing information to take on its own life in the network, and still maintaining an organization’s voice and integrity (i.e. what limitations do you place on staff of an organization when they talk about that organization? Is it fair for employees to air their personal grievances in public spaces without expecting any form of retribution?)

Information has value- and can also create risk. How transparent can you be about what you do? If you, in real time, publish figures about what and where you are distributing during a particular relief response, is community Y, 2 miles down the road, going to respond well to that information if they have access to it? How do you protect staff and aid recipients in such a context? How do you ensure protection of vulnerable people? A great example is Nick Kristoff’s catastrophic gaffe in publishing the name of a victim of child rape (and then trying to justify it)- this sort of thing must be avoided, especially as more and more communities gain access to information technology.

The risks are real. So is the potential. Organizations have to find their own balance in the complexity and uncertainty of open information networks. What they can’t afford to do, is do nothing. We need to keep investigating ways to engage with social media, networks and technology to do our jobs better, and to stay relevant.

I would love to hear input from other people- aid insiders, social networkers, media folk, anybody who has an opinion, thoughts, counters and ideas. How can and should the aid industry (including individuals working in that industry not affiliated with organizations) engage with social media?

Thanks for your time.

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39 comments on “Analysis: Social Media and Humanitarian Response”

Wow, this is a brilliant and really clear overview that outlines the many angles and ways that social media and new tech is changing and improving and frightening large organizations all at once. I think this area is one that really needs more thinking and developing within INGOs. It starts to really blur also the roles of the frontline staff, communities, programs, communications, PR, marketing, and donors/supporters in ways that a lot of agencies are not understanding or realizing that they need to seriously look at. Bravo, and I will definitely be sharing this around with my internal/external network. Thanks for writing it up!

Thanks Linda. I think one of the key issues that NGOs need to recognize is the shrinking space for a middle-man when the donor can, via social media, connect directly to the recipient- an experience which people are more likely to find rewarding and which is where people are going to step away from NGOs as their conduit into the aid world. NGOs need to be able to compete with this reality if they hope to maintain their presence here. This is especially important given that the removal of the middle-man may not actually be beneficial for communities where there is donor ignorance- although by the same token, direct contact can be a powerful catalyst for mutual education under the right circumstances and should be facilitated where appropriate.

I’m afraid I’m not clued in enough to global health literature. If you contact Michael Keizer (his blog, A Humourless Lot, is linked in my blogroll) he has a background in health logistics and may be able to put you on to people better clued in.

One must-read for anybody interested in humanitarian aid work (and which has a health bent) is the fantastic book “War Hospital” by Sheri Fink. It’s about the hospital in Srebrenica during the civil war in Yugoslavia which was staffed by MSF doctors and local volunteers in the midst of the ethnic cleansing and breakdown of humanitarian protection, and showcases the failure of the UN and other organizations in the face of a building genocide- compelling reading and incredibly important to understand.

An amazing post! You highlight the practical application of social media that often goes unnoticed by most. Social media has definitely become more instrumental in emergency response today than it ever has. We’ve come a long way from the ham radio days!

As you pointed out, the recipe for success and improvement in this arena is finding that balance between raw, credible, and useful data. I imagine information overload is a major issue that hampers effective disaster response, especially during the early stages of response. As technology evolves that makes it easier for the end user to pass information, the technology that makes it easier to catalogue, and later retrieve, useful information must also evolve. Useful information is useless if it’s lost in a sea of data. This rings true at all levels of disaster response, from the rescuer at the scene looking for buried victims up to the donors wanting to know if their contribution is making a difference before they sign that next check. Thank you for the well written, informative post!

Thanks for your thoughtful comment. You’re right- data management on a range of levels has to improve. The issue in the early days of the response is a curious blend between too much chatter (i.e. noise which needs filtering to find what is truly useful), and a dearth of information (as we found in the early days of Haiti, when nobody could clearly articulate what exactly was happening because it was just too overwhelming). As you say, cataloguing data is a serious challenge- you only need to try searching for something you want on Google to find this out- and the amount of information which is ‘lost’ amidst the clutter is probably immense. Big challenges ahead- as you’d expect with any system as vast and unregulated as the internet- but I think there are great solutions and creativity ahead out there. I think the key is to remain adaptable, and plugged into the changes in technology as they occur. Cheers.

Spectacular post and great photography. I am attempting to dive into social and multi-media, but getting started is overwhelming. I am the editor in chief of my college newspaper and I know it is important to get a jump on social media. I hired a social media editor, but neither of us really know how to expand beyond just tweeting about story ideas and breaking news. Any recommendations or books I should read?

Hi Cristalyne and thanks for your message. Great that you’re getting involved in social media. I’m pretty new to it all myself, so still finding my way. Related to what I mentioned in the post, I think you need to look at a few main questions around how to engage with networking (which is what it sounds like you’re facing at the moment)- a) what are you hoping to achieve via social networking (higher readership levels? greater interactivity with existing readers? a forum for creating new ideas? staying on top of current events?) b) who do you need to be linked to on Twitter/networks to achieve this goal (online readership communities? students from your college? other college newspaper editors? news sources?) c) what level of interaction do you want to achieve your goal (do I want just people reading what you post/tweet? do I want people linking back to your online resources? do you want people engaging you in online discussion forums? do you want people engaging with you in the real-world?) d) how can you be relevant to the people you want to engage with- assuming you are wanting people to follow you (what is my target audience interested in? what sort of engagement are they interested in?).

If you can answer those questions, you can be more strategic in what you post/tweet, in who you follow, and in finding key, well-networked contacts who you can link to and hopefully mobilize networks via.

If you (or your paper) has a blog (or an online version), make sure you’re linking back to it with updates regularly, and sharing these updates with the people who are interested in what you’re sharing. Keeping content current and fresh for your readership is essential to maintain presence and credibility (and it’s a miracle that this blog still gets readership given the amount of time I sometimes neglect it!)

This was an extremely thorough article (I wonder if it’s been submitted to a major newspaper or maybe the Huffington Post?). I felt like I was reading something that wasn’t a nonchalant musing out of someone’s head, but a cogent collection of ideas written in an intentional way.

I want to thank you for publishing this. Your words have sparked me to be a little more intentional with who I (not my moniker, but the person behind the moniker) follow on facebook. Currently, I have been following no one, but why not jig it such that I get information about the people I feel are making positive change in the world: Bruce Lipton, Lynne McTaggart, Candace Pert, Nassim Haramein, etc.

Thanks Jeremiah for your encouraging and thoughtful message, and I think your approach is a great one- tag people who you feel are going to add value to your interactions and lifestyle. No, I haven’t submitted to HuffPo (I’ve never actually looked into publishing through them, as a non-journalist it’s never occured to me), and you certainly weren’t reading a nonchalant musing (and thanks for noticing 🙂 )- This has been pulled together based on several months’ worth of experience and discussion with other aid professionals and social networkers, media and communications professional, and several hours sunk into creating a presentation for colleagues. In fact, it’s written first and foremost as a resource for those colleagues to use in their own time, and is a direct follow-up to the workshop session that I ran. I’m pleased people have found it useful/interesting. Thanks for your time.

The online travel community is utilizing social media to give back through the Cruise4Haiti. We have teamed up with For Haiti with Love, and Airline Ambassadors to contribute to the Haiti Relief Effort. Checkout the Website and share with friends!!

Excellent post! You described so well some practical applications of social media. I had the same experience last year when there was a big storm and flooding in Manila. I found myself monitoring the ongoing disaster and response through Facebook and Twitter from here in the US. I read request for help, updates from people being affected by flooding in their homes while the event was occurring. I realized it was better than traditionally media. This way you hear it straight from the people. You see them post pictures and videos showing how the water and the storm affected their homes and communities. A lot of people responded using social media to call for assistance and contribute assistance. I did a blog post at that time (http://mysimpleprocesses.com/2009/09/27/manila-flood-disaster-update-social-media-as-channel-for-disaster-coordination/) and made a personal plea for donations…we were able to collect a humble sum. I am sharing this because I experienced it myself- how social media can be both a platform and enabler for an effective and rapid humanitarian response to disaster situations. Thanks for sharing your thoughts. This is great!

Thanks for your feedback Glenn, and great that you chose to use your social network for good. Thanks too for sharing the link to your own article- you’ve neatly captured the process as it unfolded back in September. In fact, I was in Manila a couple of days after Ketsana/Ondoy passed (hence referencing it in the post) so not only did I hear about how social media was used first-hand from staff (many of whom were themselves directly affected through the loss of homes and belongings), but it also retains a special place in my memory. All the best.

This is what the focus of our children should be. To my earlier post about which people open first (Facebook or email), it’s not about last night’s party but, rather, tomorrow’s source of food. We did this to ourselves when our kids went to those gymnastics meets and EVERYONE got a trophy. Now, 8th graders assume they will get a meal, a job, and all is well with the world.
We are lucky. That’s all it is.

This article places a “toy” in a much better perspective. I hopemour kids get it someday, beforemtheynare in charge.

Modern technology does indeed allow us to do some amazing things—-like saving ourselves a trip half-around the world by using video conferencing…

Now, as far as social media are concerned, I feel that you are giving them an exaggerated positive influence: Social media has led to an explosion of this-and-that for the broad masses, but among techno-neirds, university staff, and professionals the picture is different. Email has been used since the 1960s, bulletin boards were present no later than the 1970s, online chats and ICQ-relatives were present in the 1980s (quite possibly earlier), the Web (the part of the Internet that is traversed with a browser) was originally created for easier (than with other already existing services like ftp) sharing of documents and information between researchers and professionals, the first wiki followed just a few years later, etc. (Beware, however, that the delay between first use and broad use was considerable until the Internet-boom in the 1990s.)

“Social media” is a vague term, and it is often hard to point to a specific phenomenon and say “This is social media.” or “This is not social media.”, but it is quite clear that those parts of the Internet that are truly useful in professional communications were present long before the hype around social media started (certainly before I first heard the phrase) and that the services most commonly associated with social media (facebook, myspace, twitter) are inferior alternatives for professional purposes.

My advice: Forget about social media as a concept—jumping onto a hype does more harm than good (even when the hype is for something beneficial). Instead take an objective and rational look on your needs and opportunities, and make your decisions based on pros-and-cons cost–benefit, whatnot. “We need to communicate X within a geographically dispersed team—how do we do this?” “We need to have a central knowledge-store, editable by all members of group Y—-how do we do this?” “We need to spread our political message to group Z—-how do we do this?” In contrast, do not go by “Hurrah! We have social media! How can we revolutionize our business by using it?!?” or similar.

A really useful critique and words of balance Michael, thanks for taking the time to share them. I agree with both your analysis on how long such information-sharing platforms have been around for, and the dangers of jumping on hype, and it’s well worth being measured in what language we use regarding this phenomenon. While different information-sharing networks and the like have been around for a considerable amount of time, I think we’re seeing two things that are changing at the moment. One is the huge growth in the number and diversity of platforms that are creative, innovative, easy to use, and change the experience of information-sharing. The other is the critical mass of people engaging with these specific platforms (just as email exploded in the late nineties- and has now become the defacto business model for most of the globe, in almost all industries).

On the one hand I fully agree- the only sensible business-model is to look at what our needs are, then decide accordingly (and indeed I wouldn’t advocate for anything less; and with the huge range of interesting platforms out there, and the ability to create further platforms, there is heaps to chose from and investigate). In fact currently (this week) I am invovled with a number of other aid professionals spread around the world doing just that- analysing some of the shortcomings we see in our sector, particularly around the use and availability of information, and creating a platform that meets that need. On the other hand, there is still value in looking at a medium that people are using which has acceptance and critical mass, and saying “hmm… this is where people are and where they are interacting; how can we use the energy that is in this medium and use it to improve what we are already doing”. Again, we return to email- a flawed system and one that only goes part of the way to improving business processes (and has indeed made some business processes truly miserable); there has been great value in taking an accepted medium and building business around it (recognizing the shortcomings), as well as continuing to need to look for alternative ways of operating.

I enjoyed reading your post and I agree with you people need to think of th posibilities when it comes to humanitarian aid and social media, personaly in the past I have used social media to help contact bood donors (rare type of blod) for an emergency.

You can make your post even more useful if you offer links within your blog, not just at the end.

A helpful on social media and its power for good and other is: Clay Shirky’s 2008, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. Penguin Books.

It will be interesting to see how this unfolds. I really appreciate your posting this synthesis. Since networking and social media are so new many changes lie ahead. I do have serious concerns about the misuse of these technologies while I applaud and encourage the broadening discussion and problem solving that can happen around the world.

one way I think that the news outlets (which constitute part of the social media outlets you’ve been talking about) could better accomplish the task of advertising humanitarian aid is to not reject the value that non-profits have in this endeavor….in the USA a lot of our news sources tend to be biased towards the left…..which has an agenda of vilifying conservatives/religious people every chance they get….their vilification being based much of the time on lies…for example saying that conservatives don’t care about the poor and don’t have any ideas on how to combat poverty……that is false…we got plenty of ideas…just ones that don’t conform with the liberal notion that the poor can only be taken care of by government intervention

anyhow as a conservative Catholic….this is my take on true charity….that first of all people should give charitable aid because they want to…not because they are forced to through taxation….and second of all this aid should be geared towards helping the needy become self-sufficient (i.e., give a man a fish he eats for a day, teach a man to fish and he eats for a lifetime). Government welfare programs tend to be geared towards neither goal of true charity. Government welfare programs force charity out of people through taxation and seem to be geared more towards having the needy become wards of the government rather than helping them become self-sufficient. That’s my take on charity and humanitarian aid.

I’ve really enjoyed reading the writing and yes, I agree that there should be limitations as to who to include on your electronic social net-work, this also creates a possibility to limitations of your net-work to be formed with diversities….

One of my tasks, was to bring so called professionals to so called layperson by allowing the two to interacts unknowingly…one realise, the predetermined predictions, assumptions, prejudice thinking of white-collar and layperson.

Thinking, feelings, works, art, shared provides to ‘other’ information emotionally to the individuals real-self. In the past, there was many problems with regards to so called professionalisms, the communication was limited and nor clear to understand for many… know the DR. can communicate and understand the level of the client so he/she opens and/or reduces so called professionalism…They seem to have forgotten on the way that professionalism means to be able to move in levels of knowledge system over years.

I am currently working through a re-write of an old course on humanitarian field coordination that I wrote about 10 years ago and have been thinking about improvements in efficiency that have been made in actuallly meeting humanitarian objectives in the field. Obviously, information systems have improved magnificently over the past decade, and today most field workers have or can get access the same information as dedicated technical specialists in their national or international HQs. That alone is a great thing.

I have been poking around the edges of crowdsourcing, the Ushahidi platform, and the whole phenomenon of social media and disaster response as well. I have to say that your post here is the best I’ve come across so far on these issues. For a “technology immigrant” (i.e. not a “technology native”) like me, the issues were made quite clear and you have managed to both encourage and frighten me concerning the current and future trends in this area.

I am encouraged to see so much positive energy and personal dedication in the humanitarian field by tech-savvy social communicators, yet frightened that the improvement in some areas is inevitably linked to losses in others. Your comments about the transition from an “edit then publish” reality to a “publish then edit” reality rang true to me. After drinking from the firehose of field level assessment and coordination information myself, I must admit to being somewhat afraid of too much information.

But, forever the optimist, this feels to me like something truly useful and improving….IF…. rumors can be controlled (or recognized) and if some algorithm for finding the important needles of information among the enormous haystack of posts, blogs, tweets, and texts can be normalised for the community.